Active Cases

PennEnvironment vs. GenOn

Groups use federal Clean Water Act to impose historic penalty against GenOn’s
Conemaugh Generating Station, a chronic violator located near Johnstown, PA

[Pittsburgh, PA]
– After more than four years of litigation, PennEnvironment, the Sierra Club,
and several of their local members have succeeded in imposing the largest
penalty in Pennsylvania history against a water polluter under the federal
Clean Water Act’s citizen enforcement provision.

GenOn Northeast Management Company, a subsidiary of GenOn Energy,
Inc., must pay a total of $3.75 million and must act quickly to end the
discharge violations still occurring at the company’s coal-fired Conemaugh Generating
Station located near Johnstown.

The settlement agreement reached by the plaintiff groups and
the company is embodied in a proposed consent decree, which was filed in
federal court in Pittsburgh today and awaits approval by United States
Magistrate Judge Robert C. Mitchell. The record payment includes a $250,000 civil
penalty to be paid to the United States and an additional $3.5 million that the
company will pay to the Foundation for Pennsylvania’s Watersheds to be used to
fund restoration and preservation projects in the Conemaugh River watershed,
which is the area affected by GenOn’s illegal pollution.

“While this historic penalty will send a strong message to
other companies in Pennsylvania and throughout the region, it is equally
important that the company is now committed, at long last, to complying with
its legal discharge limits and to reducing its pollution of the Conemaugh
River,” stated PennEnvironment Director David Masur. “This was a David and
Goliath-style fight—and the ‘Davids’ were able to deliver a critical victory to
the people of Pennsylvania.”

In March, Judge Mitchell ruled that GenOn had committed a
staggering 8,684 violations of the federal Clean Water Act by discharging
illegal levels of five different pollutants—some of them toxic—into the
Conemaugh River since 2005. Judge
Mitchell had scheduled a June 1 trial to determine how much to penalize the
company for its violations and how to bring the power plant into compliance
with the law.

Under the terms of the consent decree filed in court today,
GenOn has agreed to achieve compliance with its permit limits in a timely
fashion and to pay heavy, automatic penalties for any future permit
violations. In addition, GenOn must
perform tests to gauge the toxicity of its wastewater discharges and provide
that information to the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection
(DEP).

In 2007, the environmental groups alleged that GenOn had
been in continuous violation of its Clean Water Act discharge permit,
discharging more than three million gallons of wastewater per day containing
elevated levels of selenium, manganese, aluminum, boron, and iron into the
Conemaugh River. The limits in GenOn’s
permit were set by the DEP specifically to protect against degraded conditions
in the river, and to help restore the river to health. On occasion, the company has exceeded its
permitted pollution limits by over 1,000%, or more than ten times allowable
levels.

“The Clean Water Act allows citizens to take legal action
against chronic polluters when state and federal officials are unable—or
unwilling—to protect water quality,” said Thomas Au, the Conservation Chair of
the Pennsylvania Chapter of Sierra Club.
“This is a significant victory for the people who live in the Conemaugh
River watershed.”

“A clean Comemaugh River can be one of Pennsylvania's
greatest natural resources and become a major economic driver for all the
communities in the Conemaugh River watershed,” said Kurt Limbach, who owns a
home just downstream of GenOn’s power plant, in Bolivar. “As a longtime member of both PennEnvironment
and Sierra Club, I am proud of the lasting contribution these groups have made
to overcoming this beautiful river’s legacy of industrial pollution.”

GenOn (formed by the merger of Mirant and Reliant Energy) is
a Houston, Texas-based company with nearly forty-five power plants located
across the nation, including eighteen power plants in Pennsylvania. GenOn’s Pennsylvania facilities have faced
ongoing scrutiny and challenges over their environmental records. This includes the threat of legal action last
year against the company’s so-called “clean coal” Seward power plant for nearly
12,000 Clean Water Act violations, as well as run-ins with the DEP at the
company’s Cheswick, Keystone, Elrama, and Brunot Island power plants, all of
which are located in Pennsylvania.

In 2004, DEP entered into an agreement with the company not to enforce the pollution limits at
issue in this case until 2011 or later—and DEP has already extended part of
that agreement until 2012. In the citizen
groups’ lawsuit, however, the federal court ruled on three separate occasions that
this “side agreement” with DEP does not shield GenOn from its obligation to
comply with federal law or with the company’s Clean Water Act permit.

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PennEnvironment is
a statewide, citizen-based environmental advocacy organization. Sierra Club is
the nation’s largest conservation organization. The groups are
represented by the Boston-based, non-profit National Environmental Law Center
(NELC) and by attorney Thomas J. Farrell of Pittsburgh-based Farrell &
Reisinger LLC. For more information
about this or other PennEnvironment projects, please visit our website at www.PennEnvironment.org.